At a press event in 2010 following the launch of the iPad, Steve Jobs referred to the naturalness of the device’s touch input method and said “If you see a stylus, they blew it.”
In the same way of the internet it can be said that if you see any copper in the system, they blew it. And guess what, Australia, you blew it.
A good decade ago a man came to my apartment in Tokyo – at the appointed hour I should point out – and drilled a little hole in the wall and fiddled around for a bit and very shortly thereafter I had a fibre optic cable plugged into the router and websites appearing and files transferring in the blink of an eye.
Data was unlimited, speeds were reliably and consistently high in both directions – essential when your work relies on shifting large amounts of data to multiple clients and systems quickly – and it cost me about $80 a month. The service was dependable.
This week the internet came to my latest apartment in downtown Bunbury and I can only say that those advertisements comparing Australian internet service to obscure eastern European nations and finding us severely wanting cannot be far off the mark.
One must quickly develop a strong tolerance for irony when surveying many aspects of life these days and the sorry state of the internet in this country absolutely requires it. The rant that follows is not intended to single out any particular provider or service – from what I understand everyone is as bad as each other – but merely to give a brief report of my own shock and anger disguised as calm editorial philosophising and to relay a personal family anecdote with some serious implications.
The knock on the door was welcome. The Telstra salesman said my apartment building was all good to go. The NBN juggernaut had rolled through and it was just a matter of signing up and plugging in.
He mentioned a plan – the basic one evidently – saying it was fast. I said it wasn’t, and that my job required moving a lot of stuff around, so he mentioned another but that wasn’t fast either. On it went, a kind of reverse haggling with me basically pleading to spend more for anything approaching the speeds I enjoyed a decade ago. It made for a weird sales experience.
Eventually I couldn’t convince him to take any more money and I ended up with the top-of-the-wozzer 100-megabit-per-second plan. I looked forward to rejoining the information superhighway, but the problems began immediately.
They did nor originate from a single source but cascaded from decades of poor planning, design and customer service. The phone point was too old. It didn’t join the others in the right location. There was no power point next to it for the router, routers not having been imagined when the place was built. The landlord graciously had a new point put in but the only location for it was still nowhere near power so an extension cord now snakes across the room waiting to trip and kill me.
Another company had come to fix the connection and couldn’t, then the next day another man came, unaware his colleague had come the day before and failed. Telstra kept sending me two of everything but I couldn’t use any of it and when they were finally able to make the much anticipated final connection appointment I waited for an hour without anyone showing up.
Just as services concentrated in regional centres create transportation issues for people in towns further out, so too internet connectivity becomes an important concern as services move online.
My aunt’s husband had a heart attack this week and their phone is barely useful. (He’s fine thankfully.) They live in Eaton, not Mogadishu. Three times this month they’ve replaced the hardware at their own expense but really, do you think it’s the hardware?
Numerous complaints have got them nowhere and the matter is now with their federal member, but are things this bad?
My personal experience says yes, they are.
– Jeremy Hedley
